Everyone loves movie clips. But, unfortunately, they’re often hard to find online in one centralized place. There’s a simple reason for this: licensing. If someone could just solve that, they’d have a pretty killer website, right? That’s what Movieclips has. And now they’re trying to extend it with Movieclips Mashups.
The key to this (beyond a killer domain name, movieclips.com) is that they have partnerships with six major Hollywood studios to provide them with clips from films. How many clips? So far, over 12,000. Imagine if the studios could make some older clips relevant again? And what if users could do it themselves? That’s what this new Mashups products is trying to do.
Movieclips went to the studios, pitching them directly about the idea. Co-founders Zach James and Rich Raddon had two key selling points: “How do you make movies more social?” and “How do you make movies more relevant?”
The first question is nothing new (you make it easy to share the clips on the various social networks). But the second questions is interesting. For example, how do you take Top Gun — a movie which is 25 years old — and make it relevant to a 15-year-old? There’s a way — it’s a great movie — they just have to provide context with something relevant today. That’s where the mashup component of their service comes into play.
For example, on stage, they showed a bunch of clips from a bunch of movies to play out the Tiger Woods sex scandal — think: The Ladies Man.
You can also make e-cards of sorts for friends. Is someone sick? Just make them a mashup of a bunch of vomiting scenes from movies! What fun!
And it’s not just quantity. Movieclips also believes its product is superior to the others out there because they tag each of these clips with up to 1,000 pieces of metadata (dialogue, actors, moods, etc). This makes the clips very searchable — and they’ve had 30 part-time employees working on this, so it’s more reliable than machine-tagged data.
Last year at TechCrunch 50, AnyClip debuted with a similar idea. But there’s one key difference: they didn’t have the licensing agreements yet. They still don’t. Movieclips does, and that could make it a killer product.
Movieclips launched its main product (the clip search engine) in beta this past December and released an API in March.
———-Q&A With The Judges—————-
Jason Calacanis, CEO & Founder, Mahalo
Brad Garlinghouse, President, Consumer Applications Group, AOL
Tolman Geffs, Co-President, JEGI
Megumi Ikeda, SVP, Peacock Equity Fund
Shervin Pishevar, Founder & Chairman, SGN
Q: That was a perfect presentation.
Q: Yeah, the movie clip idea is difficult. But how do you make it unique?
A: The domain is important (movieclips.com). We can also syndicate our player out. We have 2 dozen portals we’re talking to right now. Yes, the clips we get aren’t only ours.
Q: What are the three revenue streams?
A: We’ll give one now — subscription revenue.
Q: It’s a pretty thing, but technically it’s not that difficult. This is won on distribution.
A: Yeah, when we launched we decided distribution was key. We need to make all these deals — like AOL.
Q: You had great video source material. But the clip is derivative. This isn’t anything that innovative. One excellent thing: you bought a great domain name. Two: you got the clips. How did you get those?
A: We were stealth and working on getting the deals before we did anything. So pre-launch we had 5 deals in place. AnyClips was the opposite. We do ad-rev split.
———- The Monetization Portion ————
It was really hard to get these deals. No one has ever done this before. We were able to give them both a piece of the ad revenue and analytics.
Our plan to make money:
1) We’ll have a subscription plan across our distribution. There’s a lot of upselling on our site too.
2) Advertising — You can get a good CPM on these.
3) Transaction — This isn’t our focus, but we did this anyway. In a few weeks time we’ll have a “buy” button. That’s an exclusive deal. It’s for businesses — if you want to use a clip in a demo, you can do it.
It’s all about our great tags. We have 30 people doing it. And we’ll crowd-source it too.
———– Second Q&A —————–
Q: You guys need to be more direct about the issues. Terrible presentation. I wouldn’t invest.
A: We’re working on a round right now.
Q: How much traffic do you need to hit?
A: 3 million uniques is what we want to hit. And I think we will.
Q: In the first presentation you killed it, but you were tired here. I think you should talk about micro-transactions too. This could be a huge app on Facebook. Think JibJab. An iPhone app too. I would also knock on Microsoft’s door everyday. Tell them they need to use your clips.